Family PhotoMary Holland Etheridge Midgett, sitting, poses with her children, from left, Spencer, Mary Dowdy, Truxton, Ernest, Frank and Iola (Bummie) Davis in this photo taken in the 1960s. Spencer and Ernest's granddaughters, Melinda Gottlieb and Anne Midgette, respectively, recently met for the first time.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — I recently met my second cousin, Anne Midgette, for the very first time. Our grandfathers Spencer and Ernest Midgett (who later changed his name to Ernst Midgette) were brothers. They both grew up in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and moved to New York City, seperately, as adults.

Spencer, my grandfather, settled on Staten Island, where I always have lived, while Ernst made his home in Brooklyn, where Anne spent her childhood.

Spencer was much older than Ernst. Consequently, my mother, Annie Lee, and her sisters were much older than Anne’s father, Bill (the artist, Willard “Bill” Midgette), and his sisters ... and so on down the line. (Anne is about 16 years younger than I am.)

My mother was close to Uncle Ernst and his family when she was in her teens and early twenties. She frequently baby-sat for his children when they were small, but they slowly drifted apart as she became busy with raising her own family, especially after Ernst and his wife, Mary, moved further away, from Brooklyn to Long Island.

By the time Anne was born, there was little contact between the two families, aside from the perfunctory weekly phone calls between Granddaddy and Uncle Ernst. These continued until my grandfather died, in 1977, about six months before Anne’s father, Bill, died in 1978.

My mother attended Bill’s funeral, but after that she mostly heard about Ernst and his family through the family grapevine. Her last actual contact with Anne’s family was after Ernst died in 1988.

So, what prompted Anne and me to get together after nearly five decades of no contact? That’s where the story gets interesting.

About four years ago, my husband, Roy, who works in the information and technology department of a state psychiatric facility in Brooklyn, was preparing a large number of old computers for disposal.

In order to ensure patient privacy, it is necessary to wipe out the hard drives of all the old machines before getting rid of them. It is also imperative to check the CD drives for the inevitable forgotten discs.

He had amassed quite a stack of these forgotten CDs and was going through them to make sure there was nothing of value on them. It was then that he made a bizarre and still-unexplained discovery.

The CD he was exploring contained photos from someone’s family album. He might have dismissed it without further attention, but he was shocked by the first picture he stumbled upon. He couldn’t believe his eyes! It was an image of my grandfather as a young Coast Guardsman.

He continued to look through the hundreds of photos on the disc, recognizing many of the people and places in Kitty Hawk that he knew to be a part of my family history. There were even pictures of my mother and her sisters when they were little. The photos spanned several generations and almost everyone in them was related to me in some way.

We were mystified.

While I recognized that the man whose name was attached to the photo album was a distant relative, I was fairly certain he still lived in Kitty Hawk and had no connection to the psychiatric center in Brooklyn.

How on earth did his photos end up there? When we eventually spoke with him, he was unaware of any connection to the facility.

Roy tried posting e-mail messages and asking co-workers if they knew where the pictures had come from, but nobody could tell him anything at all. Finally, he posted the pictures on the Internet, in hopes that someone might claim the disc and explain where the photos had come from.

Eventually, many relatives discovered this posting and were delighted and excited to reconnect to their family history.

One of these was my cousin, Anne Midgette.

Anne, who now lives in Washington, D.C., was investigating her family heritage.

She contacted Roy via the e-mail address he had posted on the Web site along with the pictures. They struck up a correspondence, and she expressed a desire to get together if we were ever in her area.

As it happened, we were planning to travel near there, so we decided to take her up on her suggestion. We met at her apartment and chatted for quite a long time, before deciding to go out for dinner together, where we chatted for quite a while longer.

So, because of a serendipitous and still-inexplicable discovery, I met my second cousin, Anne Midgette, for the very first time — and it was great!

She is beautiful, charming and intelligent and, coincidentally, we are both journalists of a sort. While I am a news librarian and Web blogger for the Advance, her passion is classical music and she writes music reviews for The Washington Post, as well as maintains a blog on the subject.

We are all looking forward to meeting again soon. We hope to meet her husband as well.

And here’s hoping that we will stay in touch as time goes on. A toast to the happy confluence of fate, the power of the Internet and DNA!